The legend attached to this cliff has given rise to the names of the rapids in the gorges below Muang Haut, and runs as follows: In ancient days a Shan princess of Viang Soo or Kiang Soo, being crossed in love by her parents refusing their consent to her marriage with a nobleman of a hostile State, determined to levant with her lover. Accordingly, one moonlight night she mounted behind him on a pony and went galloping away towards his home. When nearing the river they heard her father with his followers clattering and clammering behind them. Reaching the bank, they found themselves on the crest of the cliff, with the river a sheer drop of 120 feet below. Her father being nearly at their heels, they had no time to dodge to the right hand or to the left; they must take the leap or be caught. The lover, eager for the safety of the princess, hesitated for a moment, when his ladylove, nothing daunted, sprang in front of him, struck the pony and forced it to the leap. From that time they lived only in story, and the places where their bodies, pony, whip, saddle, harness, and other equipment were stranded, were named accordingly. Proceeding two and a half miles farther, we halted for breakfast near a pagoda and visited the Phra Bat, a footprint of Gaudama, which is situated a quarter of a mile from the west bank of the river. The footprint is 5 feet 4½ inches long, and 2 feet broad, and is impressed on a huge granite boulder, and decorated in the usual manner. Although a place of pilgrimage, no monastery is attached to it, and the temple in which the Phra Bat lies is becoming a ruin. To account for the supernatural size of the footprints, which are found of various dimensions throughout the country, we must remember that virtuous men, the possessors of accumulated merit, have intellectual properties which, besides virtue (_dharma_), knowledge, calm self-control, include supernatural power (_aiswarya_), which enables its possessor to make his way into a solid rock, to sail to the sun on a sunbeam, touch the moon with the tip of his finger, expand so as to occupy all space, and swim, dive, or float upon the earth as readily as in water. Through merit, in fact, the intellect (Buddha) attains the “absolute subjugation of Nature,” so that “whatever the will proposes, that it obtains.” But merit, however vast the stock, is consumed like fuel: thus even those in Indra’s heaven who “drink their fill of joys divine,” fall again to earth after their accumulated stock of merit is spent, and have to continue their series of births and deaths until they are purified from desire, when they obtain Neiban, become as the winds are, or as if they had never been born.